RELIABILITY ASSESSMENT OF FIELDED PLASTIC AND HERMETICALLY PACKAGED MICROELECTRONICS

This paper presents the results from multiple studies at Honeywell, of piece-part failure rates experienced in field use. These studies cons ider 7 line-replaceable-units (LRU), containing either hermetically se aled microcircuits (HSM) or plastic encapsulated microcircuits (PEM) o r both. This paper compares the resulting field failure rates (lambda) of HSM and PEM: digital devices: lambda(PEM) approximate to 0.5 lambd a(HSM); linear devices: lambda(PEM) approximate to 3 lambda(HSM); only a small fraction of the linear devices degraded in performance at 125 degrees C, though their performance at room temperature was within sp ecification.The latter two points suggest that linear devices might re quire more attention relative to characterization over temperature and application considerations than do digital devices.